As part of the launch event we wanted to share more color on how we drive innovation (and happiness!) into every dimension of our product experience, and we wanted to make one more thing clear – we’re continuing to hit the gas on innovation! If you haven’t watched the launch event you should – there’s a ton of product announcements, customer spotlights, demos, and other good fun packed into a non-stop 30 minutes. Let’s now double-click on the product announcements that push the Pure Storage innovation even further.

Four Dimensions of Innovation

At Pure, building a great all-flash array is just the beginning. We think about our landscape for innovation in four dimensions, re-imagining everything for the flash+cloud era:

Evergreen™ Storage is our core strategy – a technology architecture and business model wrapped into one – aimed at eliminating forklift upgrades and changing the entire model for storage ownership. The Pure Storage FlashArray is our all-flash array platform, powered by the Purity Operating Environment software. FlashStack is solution for converged infrastructure – creating end-to-end building blocks for accelerating the deployment of modern, cloud-based infrastructure at scale. And Pure1™ is our cloud-based platform for management and support – re-imagining what is possible with untethered management and white-glove support. Today we are announcing substantial new innovations in all four of these areas.

Introducing 3D TLC NAND to Continue Aggressive AFA Price Reduction

When we introduced the FlashArray//m in June, one of the key tenets of the architecture was modular scale. The modular and upgradable hardware, in concert with our Purity Operating Environment software, was designed to allow rapid online upgrades to take advantage of advancements in both compute and flash memory – both fundamentally driven by Moore’s Law. We announced that customers would be able to upgrade to FlashArray//m non-disruptively from their FlashArray 400-Series arrays, and in fact over 100 customers have done just that in the last few months! If you’d like to see one of these upgrades in action – check out a leading SaaS vendor, ExponentHR, perform their upgrade – it’s like no multi-generational storage upgrade you’ve ever experienced!

Today we’re announcing an upgrade option on the flash side: the non-disruptive addition of 3D TLC NAND flash to the FlashArray//m family, first available as a new 44TB expansion shelf:

FlashArray customers can now mix-and-match MLC and TLC in the same array, allowing them to improve the density of their current arrays without leaving their existing hardware investment behind (and of course, addition of the shelf is always non-disruptive like all FlashArray upgrades). Because of the FlashCare technology in Purity, we’re able to offer these 3D TLC flash modules with the same performance and lifespan as our MLC modules, including our Forever Maintenance protection, which guarantees flash wear replacement as long as a customer maintains an active maintenance & support agreement.

This new 3D TLC technology allows us to continue aggressively driving down the cost of all-flash storage, now to as low as $1.50/usable GB – further expanding the workloads for which all-flash storage can cost-effectively replace disk.

Now in order to compare effective usable price points across vendors it is critically important to understand what you are getting for your money, especially with regards to software and data reduction. For more details on comparing data reduction claims across vendors – check out this blog post. With our industry leading data reduction and all-software included, Pure can now offer effective capacity as low as $1.50/usable GB for our larger configurations. With all-flash storage priced like this, how many of your applications can’t afford to run on flash?

Evolving from Proactive to Predictive Support

At Pure we’ve always been proud of our support. Most prospective customers expect to love us for our product, but quickly they come to realize that the support is just as magical…in fact, as excited as we are about our NPS score of 79, our support actually scores higher with an NPS score of 85! Now that drives happiness.

Our support team shares an “our problem” culture, meaning that all we care about is that we solve your problem, whether that problem is caused by Pure technology or not. Pure support is a white glove experience where we call you first; where every TSE is level 2 or higher; and where upgrades and health checks are fully managed.

While proactive is great, we knew that predictive is even better, and our goal has been to find and stop problems before they start. Today we’re introducing a new global analytics platform that does just that: Pure1 Global Insight.

Pure1 Global Insight is a real-time analytics platform that takes the real-time telemetrics feeds from the 1,000s of FlashArrays deployed globally and monitors them constantly for potential issues whether configuration, vulnerability, performance, or capacity related. If we find such a potential issue we call the customer immediately and begin remediation with the customer’s permission via our RemoteAssist technology. This ensures that you should never have to call support and hear “oh yeah, we knew about that issue, there’s a patch available”…it also means that we’ll let you know if you make a configuration change or add a mis-configured server down the road and put yourself unknowingly at risk. We’re adding new signatures and expanding the intelligence of Pure1 Global Insight daily – this is just the beginning of the Predictive Support journey.

See the Future with Pure1 Capacity Planner

In addition to the predictive support value of Pure1, the platform also delivers cloud-based manageability – untethering storage admins from the complex, bulky, framework-based storage management experience of yestervendor.

While other vendors require stand-alone capacity trending and forecasting tools (added expense and deployment headache) – Capacity Planner is all built right into Pure1 (no extra charge, of course). Pure1 Capacity Planner allows you to use a variety of forecasting models (simple linear or projecting based upon a known busy period – like last quarter end, for example), telling you when you are expected to run out of capacity. Simple to analyze, chart, and then grab an extrapolation for that upcoming budget meeting with your CFO!

All-Flash Converged Infrastructure – Now for Oracle and SAP!

A year ago Pure first launched, in conjunction with our technology partners Cisco and VMware, our all-flash converged infrastructure solution – FlashStack. FlashStack provides a simple, all-flash alternative to legacy CI solutions, aimed at speeding the deployment of modern cloud infrastructure. Since the FlashStack launch customer and partner adoption has been phenomenal, and FlashStack is now powering some of the largest private and public cloud environments in the world.

Over the past year we’ve shipped FlashStack solutions to accelerate the deployment of common cloud infrastructure and applications, such as VMware vSphere for private and public clouds, VMware Horizon View and Citrix XenDesktop for VDI at scale, and Microsoft SQL Server to accelerate SQL OLTP and data warehouse environments. Today we’re adding to the FlashStack family with solutions for Oracle and SAP.

FlashStack for Oracle is built upon highly-available Oracle RAC, and enables the consolidation of transactional and data warehouse workloads into one CI solution. It delivers built-in compression, deduplication, and encryption which are fully-offloaded from the database server, and makes DBAs more efficient via snapshot and cloning technologies to speed test/dev and data protection. It even includes an Oracle OEM plugin for DBA visibility, as well as Commvault IntelliSnap integration for automating off-host database snapshot backups and recoveries.

FlashStack for SAP enables customers to bring all-flash performance to traditional SAP ERP Landscapes. It delivers 4:1 average data reduction, and accelerates the SAP System Copy process dramatically, reducing the time spent on common SAP administration tasks by up to 50%. Although this FlashStack is designed for traditional SAP environments, FlashArray//m is also certified with SAP HANA, and a FlashStack for SAP HANA is coming soon as well!

…And a Challenge for You!

Well, as you can see, we haven’t taken our foot off the innovation gas pedal here at Pure Storage! In addition to an unheard of NetPromoter score – substantial and new innovation announced in every area of our product family:

We have one final thought for you, and a challenge. For years price and maturity have been excuses to keep using legacy disk storage…yet every dollar you spend on disk is investment in the rear view mirror, not investment that will take your business forward.

So today – we’d like to challenge you to try flash, and to try Pure. Pure has two advantages – it’s not only less expensive than the disk you are buying today, but due to our leadership in efficiency (data reduction plus purpose-built flash hardware innovation) – it offers more usable storage per raw TB of flash than competitive AFAs. So we’ve cooked up a bit of a challenge for you…don’t take our word for it – head over and take the challenge for yourself! Not only will we beat your cost of disk and offer you more effective capacity, but we’ll even coordinate a buy-back for your existing disk array, and give you a like-for-like credit on maintenance for the remaining maintenance term on your disk array (up to three years).

With all-flash storage reliably less expensive than disk, and Pure as the #1 recommended storage technology on the planet…there has never been a better time to retire your disk array and make he move to all-flash.